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The Lost Startup Benefit: Paid Maternity Leave

Last year at PaperG, one of our employees discovered she was pregnant. This was a first for the company, so in addition to being excited for her, we found ourselves putting into place our own maternity leave policy for the first time.

We started by researching what other startups were providing their employees. Surprisingly we found no definitive guide or benchmark for startups, so we decided to conduct our own survey to help create one.

For our research we polled people from startups – with little funding to post IPO – to see what types of polices were being implemented across startups at different stages.

The purpose of our survey was two-fold:

Learn how much paid maternity leave startups offer

Learn what stage of a startup’s life did offering paid maternity/paternity leave become common

Overall we found that despite the immense pool of benefits used to attract talent in the startup world—such as catered lunches, gym memberships, and unlimited vacation—paid maternity leave is sorely lacking in attention. Yet, the necessity of implementing maternity leave policies is more important than many startups may think.

What We Found

From our research, we saw that not a single seed stage startup offered a paid maternity leave policy. The implementation of a policy became more common as funding stages grew. Some Series A, B and C startups were lacking policies. Maternity leave only became unanimous at the Series D stage of funding and post-IPO.

Given the loose adoption of paid maternity leave, we polled 101 women working in tech, and found 61% of women said they wouldn’t work for a startup or tech company that didn’t have a maternity policy. This suggests that all of the seed stage startups, and some of the Series A, B and C are potentially missing out on a huge portion of female tech talent.

We also found several other correlations:

The age of the startup related to the likelihood it had a paid maternity policy

A larger representation of females positively related to the likelihood of having paid maternity leave policy

In startups, there seems to be no relationship between stage of funding, and the amount of paid leave given

The following deck gives you a look into the full results of our survey.

Could a paid maternity leave policy help startups attract more women? It seems so. Maybe it’s time for more startups to consider putting one in place.